Why restaurant food at home beats eating out

‘The opposite of a correct statement is a false statement. But the opposite of a profound truth may well be another profound truth.’ That’s Niels Bohr. Or, as Oscar Wilde put it: ‘In art there is no such thing as a universal truth. A truth in art is that whose contradictory is also true.’

Like physics and art, many other fields require that you embrace contradictions — because you can’t avoid them. Take innovation. Yes, a great deal of progress is combinatory: two or more technologies are combined to accomplish some hitherto impossible task. But, as the Soviet-era scientist Genrich Altshuller noticed, much innovation follows the opposite path, separating things which were previously combined. The productivity gains from factory electrification only appeared decades after the electric motor was invented when people learned to break manufacturing down into independent stages, each powered by small motors, rather than running everything off one big power source, as was the practice with steam.